Posts

Step Zero: Toward Human Flourishing

Step Zero: Toward Human Flourishing Meaning of Life What if, while reading the lines below, you granted me a temporary suspension of judgment, so that I might demonstrate that the “meaning of life,” contrary to what prevailing opinion tends to suppose, is in fact one of the most evident things there is? 1 — ANALYZING A HUMAN LIFE AS AN OBJECT In order to discover the meaning of our own life, we must first learn to analyze a human life as an object of knowledge. A human life, however, can only be examined in its entirety when contemplated from birth to death. Only then does it become possible to observe its resultant: what that existence effectively became once the whole of its trajectory had been completed. As long as the individual remains alive, his story remains open. A new action may still confirm, modify, contradict, or even redeem everything he has previously done. For this reason, at this first stage, our own life cannot be regarded as a completed totality. We must therefore beg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Intelligence and Education

Intelligence is not the same thing as education, but rather a requirement for it. The original intelligence test developers had in mind the selection of children who would do well at school and children who would not. For this reason it is quite controversial if a person who was a bad student takes pride in having a high IQ, as some people I met in other high intelligence societies do. In the world's largest high intelligence society, I got to know several people who were intelligent but poorly educated and had no interest in the acquisition of knowledge. What was especially problematic is that they were intolerant of people like me who had a different attitude; they hated me for successfully completing several university degrees. For this reason I stated that I was mainly looking for university graduates when I founded Prudentia. However, I am well aware that you can also acquire knowledge through autodidact learning. That is why I do not limit membership to university graduates. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Would Einstein find a publisher today?

Einstein was an average student and wasn't admitted to doctoral studies after completing his Bachelor's degree. Then came annus mirabilis, in which he wrote five groundbreaking papers. These papers were published even though he was an independent scholar without a PhD degree at that time. The question is: If somebody like Einstein lived today, would he get published? I can talk of my own experience: I was an independent scholar with an MD and an MSc degree when I wrote my paper "Symbiont Conversion Theory", which described a novel idea how to solve the problem of antimicrobial resistance, one of the most pressing problems in clinical medicine. It took a whole seven years until I found a scientific journal that was willing to publish my paper! So I think the reason why there hasn't been a second Einstein yet is also the publishing system. A person of Einstein's genius and without the required academic credentials and connections will have a hard time getting hi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Citizen Cyborg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Cyborg - This 2004 book written by James Hughes provides an overview of future technologies related to medicine which mostly still belong to the realm of utopia now, more than twenty years later. As I wrote in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-misery-of-transhumanism.html there has been little progress in implementing these ideas. But as you can read in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2024/10/longevity-medicine-state-of-art-2024.html longevity medicine has developed a little since Aubrey de Grey published his “strategies for engineered negligible senescence” (SENS) in 2005. From "Citizen Cyborg": <<In 1977, Rifkin went on to start his think tank, the Foundation on Economic Trends, dedicated to throw ing roadblocks in the way of biotech. Rifkin named his nemesis algeny, “the improvement of existing organisms and the design of wholly new ones with the intent of perfecting their performance.” But, for Rifkin, algen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Magazines of High IQ Societies

I've recently read some issues of Noesis, the journal of the Mega Society, available at https://megasociety.org/#noesis . My impression: The level is approximately the same as that of Telicom, the journal of the ISPE. But: While the ISPE requires a minimum IQ of 146, the Mega Society requires 172. That makes me believe that 146 is enough to ensure high intellectual standards and it doesn't make sense to be more selective than that. Therefore I think that the IQ requirement of Prudentia, which is 140, is a good one. Prudentia has the potential to become a high-quality intellectual society just like the ISPE. In fact, Prudentia is already one of the most active high intelligence societies for the time being. Claus D. Volko 
Post a Comment
Read more

Limits of Artificial Intelligence

According to this article ,  "[t]he current scramble to integrate 'neuro-symbolic' AI is less of a breakthrough and more of a desperate patch job, an attempt to hide the fact that modern machine learning still cannot truly reason". Since machine learning has its limits, researchers and developers are now experimenting with systems that combine machine learning and rule-based inference. This is what they call "neuro-symbolic AI". But in my opinion, the author of the mentioned article is right that this is only like darning one's socks and not a real solution to the problem. The graphs included in an old article about Taylor polynoma  written by me illustrate the root cause of the problem that machine learning is increasingly reaching its limits. Polynomial functions can only approximate trigonometric and other complex functions to a certain extent. Outside a specific range, the results make no sense. And that explains why neural networks hallucinate. C...
Post a Comment
Read more

The world in which I am living (2026)

Image
  I was born in Vienna in 1983. My parents originally wanted me to become a doctor. That's why I attended a high school specializing in modern languages, where I spent six years learning Latin. As a teenager, however, I had little interest in medicine; instead, I was mainly interested in computer science. I wrote my first computer programs when I was just eight years old. The media also reported that the IT industry was the only growing sector in Austria. So, a year before my high school graduation, I told my parents that I wanted to study computer science. However, I was put off by reports claiming that the IT industry was only looking for truly talented people - and I wasn't sure if I was one of them. That's why I let my father talk me into starting medical school instead. During my senior year of high school, I had also read a few books on biotechnology and genetics - at least I had found those interesting. After three years, during my hospital internships, I realized th...
Post a Comment
Read more